About British Library Sounds

British Library Sounds presents 50,000 recordings and their associated documentation
from the Library’s extensive collections of unique sound recordings which come from
all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound: music, drama and
literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds.

The selection available here comes from the 3.5 million sounds held in the British
Library. You can search and browse the entire collection with the
sound and moving image catalogue.

The original selections were made during the Archival Sound Recordings (ASR) project
that ran from 2004 to 2009 and which was funded by the
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) under its
Digitisation Programme. British Library Sounds is the new name for Archival
Sound Recordings. It retains all of the ASR content to which many thousands of new
recordings have been added. New features and an improved player are available and
the whole website has undergone a thorough re-design.

On the web

Where copyright permits, many recordings
are available worldwide to the general public to listen to online. The main exception
concerns the classical music recordings which are not available for streaming to
the United States.

UK Higher and further education

Staff and students at licensed UK higher and further education institutions can
listen to all recordings online and download the majority of them for academic use.
Institution librarians can request a free licence from
the Reference Team.

In the British Library

Anyone with a
Readers Pass can listen to the recordings on the computers in British Library
reading rooms.

Metadata

Every recording on this website is accompanied by metadata – the descriptive, technical
and administrative information about the item. The basic descriptive metadata presented
with recordings typically includes:

the name of the recording

the date it was recorded

where it was recorded

who recorded it

who is performing or speaking

a brief description of the contents

Further information on how the digitised files were processed is available by clicking
on the link "View full metadata for this item". To return to an item page from the
metadata page please use your browser's back button.

Most of the descriptive information about the recordings comes from the
Sound and Moving Image catalogue, some is gleaned from materials found with
the original physical carrier (such as a record sleeve or a tape label) and some
may come from accompanying notes provided by the person who recorded it. Logged
in users can supplement this data by adding tags
and contextual information about the recordings
for other researchers to use.

The metadata is encoded in METS
(XML) and compliant with Dublin Core standards.

Intellectual property rights

The clearance of third-party rights has been essential to the success of this website.
Innovative licensing arrangements to permit use of material in an educational and
research environment have been sought with commercial publishers as well as with
individual rights owners and their representatives. Where possible, rights for full
public access have been obtained.

The site is governed by an ethical use policy
and a notice and take down procedure is provided in the event that an unidentified
rights owner comes forward. If you consider yourself a rights owner or know of the
whereabouts of a rights owner please contact
the Reference Team.

submit a case study on how
you are using the resource. This may be used on the website
or on leaflets, helping to showcase how audio can be used in teaching learning and
research.

Background

During the Archival Sound Recordings project (2004-2009) the British Library digitised
tens of thousands of recordings of music, spoken word and environmental sounds from
the British Library Sound Archive.

The first phase of the project, ASR1, ran from 2004 to 2007 and provided 12,000
recordings online to
licensed UK higher and further education institutions. The second phase,
ASR2, ran from 2007 to 2009, increasing the number of recordings to over 44,000
and, where rights permitted, extending access to many recordings to anyone.

Metadata

METS can incorporate many disparate kinds of information in a single record or group
of records while providing a consistent archival structure. For instance, METS can
contain legacy information about the archival original while also documenting the
process of digitisation and audio segmentation, together with the provision of standard
descriptive data encoded in Dublin Core.

The descriptive data has been delivered as the British Library Application Profile
for Sound (BLAP-S).

The ASR website contains many oral history interviews, some over 40 hours long.
These interviews have been segmented for accessibility, but have been presented
in such a way that the user can easily locate all the other parts of the interview,
as well as their descriptions.

The ASR website is fully compliant with the Open
Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), allowing
third-party projects to provide access to the ASR files. Please contact the Reference
Team if you would like to access the mechanism for harvesting metadata from the
site.